Tylyn K. Johnson (he/they) is a part-time writer from Indianapolis, IN. He writes to reflect the traditions of storytelling and empowerment he comes from through the framed lenses of Black and Queer artistry. Their language has appeared in the lickety~split, Brainchild Magazine, Queen Spirit Magazine, and Rigorous, among other spaces. A recipient of the 2021 Myong Cha Son Haiku Award, they have performed various readings and obtained multiple writing awards at the University of Indianapolis. Tylyn is also the creator of "Communal Creativity: A Game of Poetry" on itch.io. His projects and social media can be found at linktr.ee/tykywrites. (@TyKyWrites on Instagram and Twitter)

black man: femininity and fluidity

tylyn johnson

For a single moment, I inhabit the altar of Black femininity,
with my silhouette dressed in the spotlight,
and a dress embracing my frame with all the love I spent a lifetime rejecting.
My heels bring me a little closer to a heaven I’m not sure I believe in yet,
though my feet burn like hell.
My face has become a canvas of a woman’s making, a painting come to life,
and upon my lips rests a song I had long known, but had finally started mastering.
This burden of magic felt heavy at first, but I soon stopped feeling its weight.
My soul had long left my body during the performance,
so I retreat backstage as my friends in the crowd scream for an encore,
now I can hear my heartbeat, and as it dies down my mind goes elsewhere.

I am reminded of when I first started to seriously toy with my own femininity as a man,
with strutting in heels and draping finery over this body I tend to call pitiful,
of how the first people to make me feel beautiful and worthy
were the Black girls I went to high school with.
They showed me I could be beautiful, that I could inherit divinity for just a moment in time.
Sometimes, I think my mother doesn’t believe that a man can be beautiful or holy,
that I will never be able to inhabit neither beauty nor holiness as I am.
And history and her experiences validate that.
Even if she never disapproves of how softness flows from these Black lips,
I still remember the conversations we would have after I first came out to her as gay,
how she’d say that gay men act effeminate, like women, for attention.
And you know, maybe that’s true,
but is there something wrong with wanting to be in the spotlight
after being relegated to the shadows, the background, the closet, for so long?
Should I cease this part of my journey of existence to be a “real man?”

I sometimes want to ask her if she thinks my queerness deserves to manifest itself in femininity,
but why would I ask the divine if I may reach inside myself for paradise,
when she has already preached to me that it is up to me to craft my own holy throne?
After all, she birthed me full of love to survive even the hatred of a cruel reality,
so I gather all that love in my hands as I define my own worthiness,
and although this world may not approve, I sit before this metaphysical altar,
allowing a lush heritage of femme Black royalty to reign over me as man.
And so in those moments where I become queenly,
where I smile in the mirror and profess my scars to be jewels upon my skin, I recognize;
as man, queen, or anybody in-between or outside that binary, I will face a constant criticism
even as tens of hundreds of people would uplift me,
for my daring to reach an existence culminating at the intersection of allure and heaven
threatens those who know only of a status quo.
Who would rather pluck the soft flower of Blackness from this world as if it were a weed,
or better yet, to trample such a graceful living thing.
Who would demean sweetness in masculinity to be a poisonous fruit,
hoping to drag a fag through brimstone and fire misread from ancient scriptures,
as if a nigga ain’t a person at they core.
All I can do is let them claim that I am the most unnatural thing since God made women,
because if we are so unnatural in queerness,
then the feminine sex are simply otherworldly beings,
and this is true, for only a goddess may sanctify this land with rainbows
after the April showers have frozen over the winter,
breathing color into a world long seen in grays and faded greens.
And is it such a sin for a man to wish to aspire to be like a goddess?
Is it so wrong to wash myself in my melanin, and in my soul’s rainbows,
in order to ascend into a gorgeous kind of paradise?
What is so wrong with wanting to deliver myself away from toxic masculinity, out of monotony,
so that I can be reborn into a colorfully free existence?
All so that I can live with the fluidity of water clear enough for us to see every color,
a life forged from artistry and expression and performance, divinely beautiful.